I'll give you climate change, but the rest is a huge stretch. Go back at any time in human history and you'd be hard pressed to say they were better off under authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
The climate crisis and the sixth extinction is unfortunately the only issue that really matters from a historical point of view.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
